


Dandelion Wine

by Carrionflower



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Sex, Awkward Hawke, Emetophobia, Fluff, Fluffy Meetcute Bullshit, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Modern Thedas, Nomad Fenris, Orlais, Past Lives, Slow-ish burn, Switch/vers Fenris
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 02:43:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrionflower/pseuds/Carrionflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garrett Hawke, 27 years old and entirely unremarkable, is on his very first holiday to Orlais. He drops a bag of apples, goes to the opera, learns how to swear in Orlesian, gets very drunk, throws up a few times -- and meets a white-haired stranger with a crooked smile that cracks apart Hawke's boring life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is entirely self-indulgent and I have no regrets. Minor warning for some vomit mentions throughout the story.
> 
> I pledge my undying fealty to the greatest beta/muse of all time, [liluye](http://http://archiveofourown.org/users/mouselini).

The first time in his life that Garrett Hawke meets Fenris, it’s in the cramped moonlit courtyard of Kirkwall’s alienage, with Aveline at his back and the corpses of a dozen slavers at their feet.

The second time in his life that Garret Hawke meets Fenris, it’s on the rain-slick sidewalk in Orlais as he dodges a motorbike and drops a bag of bruised apples, seven centuries later.

 

\---

 

Hawke is taking his very first vacation. He’s twenty-seven years old.

“This is disgusting,” Carver says. “Look at all the vacation time you’ve accrued. You’ve never used any of it! What the hell have you been _doing_?”

“Uh,” Hawke says, because the answer to that is _working_ and _nothing_ , both of which are equally shameful, and Carver already thinks he’s a fucking nerd.

So he shuttered his apartment and left his dog Lola with Aveline and now he’s in the airport texting Isabela a photograph of a packet of chips that costs $9, because he’s two hours early for his flight and _nine fucking dollars_ for a bag of air? Airports are ridiculous. When his flight number is called, he presents his boarding pass like a first-grader proudly turning in a book report and then hits himself in the face with his own luggage as he sweatily crams it in one of the overhead bins.

“Need a hand?” he asks an elderly woman as she limps down the narrow aisle. She doesn’t answer but he thinks she mumbles _feckoff_ over her shoulder.

Hawke sits down and folds his excessively long legs into the tiny space, his knees jabbing into the seat ahead of him. The last time he was on an airplane was when he was thirteen and his family -- or what was left of it -- was moving to Kirkwall, and it was miserable. He threw up in his mother’s lap and then Carver did too. Carver was a sympathy-puker, which was deeply unfortunate, because Garrett threw up a lot. Like a defensive response. His mother had a stash of emergency barf bags in the backseat of her car for his entire childhood.

The novelty of flying wears off after about twenty minutes, which says a lot about how inured Hawke has become to actual fucking miracles, and his legs hurt. He’s hungry and he regrets not buying that $9 bag of air. He doesn’t throw up, though. Progress.

The wide-open space of the Val Royeaux airport is overwhelming in comparison to Kirkwall, and Hawke is buffeted by bright light and loud sounds and something that smells unbelievably appetizing. Right outside the terminal there’s a cluster of carts and stands, food vendors and people hawking trinkets and chattering in Orlesian to him as he passes by.

One of the carts is selling thick cuts of grilled meat wrapped in bread, and he buys one in a process of trial and error. Lots of pointing and guessing, but whatever he ends up with is delicious and probably didn’t cost $9 (he hopes). Hawke shrugs his backpack over his shoulder and wanders down the street, eating from wax paper and dripping meat juice down his elbow. A few taxis slow to a stop at the curb next to him but he waves them off; theoretically the hotel should only be a few blocks from here and anyway he’s having a tender moment with this incredible sandwich-thing that he doesn’t want strangers intruding upon.

But because Hawke’s life is a farce, the hotel is over a mile away from the airport and he gets unbelievably lost looking for it. He asks for directions once from a kindly-looking man and the answer he gets is a garbled mess of Orlesian that is honestly kind of terrifying. They talk so fucking _fast_ , Hawke marvels as he continues to walk in the wrong direction.

Eventually he relents, flags down a taxi, and it costs a lot more than $9. Jetlagged and aching and a little bit more broke than he was before, Hawke stumbles into his hotel and falls asleep for thirteen hours.

 

\---

 

On the second day of his first vacation, Hawke visits a museum, gets lost again, is shouted at by a gaggle of young women because (from what he could gather) they liked his beard, nearly gets taken out by someone riding their bike on the sidewalk, and ends up wandering down a meandering cobblestone street where he finds a very small cafe. He pours himself bonelessly into a wrought-iron chair on the patio of the cafe as the sun goes down with a signed copy of Varric’s newest book and a pristine white cup of something frothy and caffeinated. The evening air is warm and lovely and Hawke is exhausted in an otherworldly way, like how it feels to come down from some truly fantastic sex. He really likes museums.

 _Orlais is pretty fucking amazing,_ he texts Isabela. _People here seem to appreciate my beard._

 _yes hawke your beard is nice,_ Isabela says with a degree of eye-rolling that can be felt across time and space, and tells him to take pictures of all the crisply-dressed attractive people that absolutely litter the streets of Val Royeaux. They are everywhere: every single person that Hawke passes is dressed like they are attending a wedding, a business meeting, or a funeral. Or all three, probably. Rich fabrics, pressed shirts, shined shoes, tailored suits, vibrant dresses… Hawke feels out of place in his jeans and boots that are both about two weeks away from disintegrating entirely.

He leans back in his chair, the metal pressing cold lines into his skin, and tries to take a surreptitious photo of someone passing by, their head lowered to stare at the sidewalk as they pass the cafe. Black leather jacket, perfect-fit black trousers, expensive black shoes. White hair, dark skin.

 _white hair haha wtf,_ Isabela says. _is he old? a sexy grandpa???_

 _Idk I didn’t see his face,_ Hawke says, putting a frowny emoticon at the end.

 _ok well unless he’s like 100 years old then white hair is just pretentious,_ Isabela proclaims. _orlesians are fuckin weird._

 

\---

 

On the third day of his first vacation, the sky is grey and wet but Hawke decides he wants to blend with the locals. His hotel is on a major street and so he looks right, looks left, then picks a direction and just walks, hoping he’ll find something interesting. He passes bookstores, restaurants, a comic book shop, a sex toy store, a couple of bars, and then he comes upon a corner market in a whitewashed brick building that has a wooden box of sweet-smelling mangoes sitting on the front step, propping the door open invitingly.

 _Blend,_ Hawke thinks.

Inside it’s cool and quiet and Hawke picks up various pieces of fruit as if he were inspecting them for quality when really he’s just doing it because he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands.

The floorboards are warped and old and Hawke thinks they look like they’re original, that they’ve been in place since this building came into existence, and the thought awes him a little bit. Most things in Orlais are much, much older than even the oldest thing in Kirkwall. His feet are touching history. (Briefly he feels guilty again for his scuffed, dirty boots.) So he is looking down at the floor when he walks into a stack of apple crates; his knobby knees knock them all to the ground and the apples scatter.

Hawke buys all of the apples that hit the floor because his mother raised him to do chivalrous shit like that. Outside, it’s starting to rain and the sound is beautiful, like soft static.

“Sorry,” Hawke mumbles again to the shopkeep, hefting the bulging bag in his arms. “I’m sure these floor apples will be delicious.”

She squints in annoyance and shrugs at him, not understanding, and he ducks out the door into the rain. The drops are cold but the air is still warm, and Hawke hesitates on the corner for a moment, staring dreamily out at the domes and spires of Orlais.

 _“Bouge de là!”_ someone shouts. _“Bouge de là, stupide!”_

A hand closes around his arm and yanks him out of the way as a motorbike putters past at top speed, roughly a quarter of a centimeter from ending his life. Hawke startles and drops his bag of apples and they roll away sadly, whereupon he decides that these apples should just be allowed to return to the earth.

Black leather jacket, black pants, black shoes. White hair, dark skin.

“I recognize you,” Hawke says.

Hawke’s savior blinks at him. Green eyes. Aquiline nose.

“Er, I guess _thank you_ would probably be a better opener,” Hawke says.

“You’re welcome,” White Hair says, then glances down at the honestly ridiculous number of apples now littering the sidewalk.

“They deserve to be free,” Hawke explained, following his gaze. “They tried to escape earlier and really at this point I think they’ve earned it.”

“How magnanimous of you,” White Hair says. It comes out more deadpan than the most deadpan thing Hawke has ever heard before in his life, and Hawke tries not to laugh but he ends up snorting. It’s horrible. White Hair grins crookedly.

“What was that guy yelling at me? Telling me to move?” Hawke asks, kicking an apple into a storm drain. _Bon voyage,_ _fucker._

“Yes. _Bouge de là,_ ” White Hair says. His accent is perfect. “And he called you stupid.”

“Hardly the first time,” Hawke admits. “You know Orlesian? D’you live here?”

“I do,” he says. “And you sound Fereldan. How did you end up in Val Royeaux?”

_Wow. He’s got a good ear._

“Visiting on holiday.” Hawke resists the urge to boastfully add _it’s my first!_ like a kid who just lost a tooth. “Always thought Orlais was beautiful, but I don’t know if I’d be able to live here. I mean, for starters, I don’t speak the language.”

White Hair looks him up and down critically. “You don’t dress the part, either.”

“Cruel,” Hawke says. “You save my life only to bleed me dry with your words.”

“Before you expire, you should tell me your name,” White Hair says, flicking rainwater out of his green eyes.

“Garrett. Well, Hawke, actually, I suppose. Nobody calls me Garrett.”

“Fenris.”

Hawke extends a hand and White Hair -- Fenris -- considers it for a moment before shaking it. White ink tattoos brush over his chin in serpentine lines and disappear under the collar of his jacket. Hawke has never seen them before but for a dazed moment he feels as though he has -- he feels as though he could trace the pattern by memory, down his throat, over his chest, across his hips. And then the memory rolls away like the apple in the storm drain.

 

\---

 

Day four, and Hawke has plowed through three art museums like he’s got something to prove. He’s seen the Grand Cathedral, he’s toured the grounds of the University of Orlais, and he took a bunch of selfies with the White Spire in the background because the history of the place creeped him out too much to actually get close.

He is touristed the _fuck out._

It might have been poor planning on his part, considering he’s got nearly six weeks of time off and plenty of opportunity to see absolutely everything, but he’s just so _excited._

Besides, he had to distract himself somehow. He got Fenris’ number yesterday -- at Fenris’ request, no less -- handed his phone over and Fenris tapped it in with fastidious fingers, white hair falling lazily into his eyes.

“You want to see Orlais?” Fenris asks. “I can show you the parts of Val Royeaux that nobody ever talks about.”

Hawke’s idiot brain thinks, _I want to see the parts of you that nobody ever talks about,_ which is inappropriate and also doesn’t even make sense, while his mouth says “yes, that would be wonderful, thank you.”

Anyway, now his phone is dead because he wasted its entire battery obsessively checking it or texting Isabela pictures of history-rich relics and beautiful men, so Hawke takes a taxi back to the hotel and flops down on his giant white bed to plug his phone in. The bedclothes are mussed and he burrows into them like a large mole. Within ten seconds, he’s half-asleep.

His phone makes a small, charming _ding_ noise as it struggles back to life, and then it dings a few more times in succession. Hawke rolls over, kicking his way out of the blankets, and looks at it, then feels immensely popular. He has six -- six! -- new text messages.

Aveline, telling him to stop distracting Isabela while she’s working; Isabela, thanking him for the distraction while she’s working; Merrill, sending him links to even more tourist attractions in Val Royeaux; and Fenris, inviting him downtown later that evening.

Hawke does a fist pump of personal victory and accidentally yanks his phone charger out of the wall, so he has to plug it back in and wait for it to turn on before he can respond to any of his thousands of texts from his adoring fans. He jogs around the hotel room.

 _Send Aveline a picture of the marble relief of that pack of hunting mabaris,_ he makes a mental note. _She’ll love it and forgive me._

Aveline likes dogs almost as much as Hawke does. (Which was why she agreed to put up with his dog, Lola, for six weeks while he jetted off to Orlais.)

 _Tell Isabela about Fenris, and inform her that he is not a sexy grandpa. Show Merrill the close-up photo you took of Andraste’s cleavage in the Grand Cathedral, because you’re both sinning heathens._ He ticks these things off on his fingers.

 _And tell Fenris you will go anywhere he asks you, forever._ Hawke shakes his head at his reflection in the bay window that looks out over the street. _Tell Fenris yes, thank you._

When his cell phone is functional again, Hawke opens Fenris’ text.

 

 **Fenris (3:09 PM):** _Friend of mine is playing a show later tonight in the city. Want to accompany me?_

 **Hawke (3:45 PM):** _Yes, thank you_

 **Fenris (3:49 PM):** _Meet me at the bazaar at sunset. We can walk the rest of the way._

 

\---

 

The bazaar is a an open-air market staged in a courtyard paved with white flagstones. Everything is covered in flowers and someone is playing an accordion. It smells like spices and cigarette smoke and summer air, and the slowly fading sunlight paints everything orange. Hawke wants to take a picture, but he thinks the flat, contextless silence of a photograph would not capture what mattered.

Instead, he wanders, stepping around passersby who are shopping before the bazaar closes at dark. Nearby, there’s a covered patio filled with people eating and drinking and laughing. Two children dart in front of Hawke, giggling, but then they skid to a stop when a familiar voice scolds them.

Hawke looks up and Fenris is there, kneeling in front of the children -- two girls dressed in frilly white lace. He says something in Orlesian and the girls shyly point at the patio. Fenris nods and shoos them back in that direction with a gentle hand.

When he notices Hawke looking, he seems abashed and says, “Parents get lax when they drink and their kids stray too far, and then you see their face on a milk carton.” His green eyes glow in the vibrant dusk light.

He leads Hawke away from the bazaar and they fall into step, side by side. Fenris points out various local landmarks: “I once sat on the lip of that fountain to eat my lunch and I was so violently mobbed by pigeons that I had to run away and leave my sandwich as a distraction.”

They pass a theater marquee lit by bare bulbs. “This place apparently shows old porno films on Friday afternoons. Oh, and that bistro there has the best cafe au lait I’ve ever tasted.”

A beautiful and imposing brick building looms over the street, one of the university’s libraries. “I fell asleep on the steps of the library once and woke up to people throwing coins at me, thinking I was homeless.”

Hawke grins. “What’d you do with the money?”

Fenris jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the bistro they’d recently passed. “Bought myself a cafe au lait.”

“How long have you lived here?” Hawke asks, quietly amazed by the life that this stranger is telling him, unspooling fragments of stories that are just as mundane and yet twice as magical as anything Hawke has ever done.

“Hmm.” Fenris shrugs in the dimming twilight. He and Hawke part for a moment, bifurcated by a group of teenagers obstructing the sidewalk, and when they return to each other, Fenris is staring down at his feet. “Long enough, I suppose.”

“Where did you live before you came to Orlais?”

Fenris offers a cigarette to Hawke, a brand called Gauloises, but Hawke declines, having been badgered into quitting by Aveline last year.

“Everywhere. I drifted,” Fenris says. A brief spark of flame casts his face in gold as he lights his cigarette. “And you? Where have you put down roots?”

“I’ve spent most of my life in the Free Marches,” Hawke says, “but Ferelden is really my home. Most people can tell, too. It’s like they say -- you can take the man out of Ferelden, but you can’t take Ferelden out of the man.”

Fenris chuckles softly. “Can’t get the dog smell out, either, if Orlesians are to be believed. They say all sorts of unsavory things about Fereldans.”

“No, they don’t like us much, do they?” Hawke sighs, shaking his head. “Their loss. As you can see, Fereldans are both handsome _and_ charming.”

With a noise like laughter, Fenris pushes Hawke inside a brightly-lit bar teeming with people. The place is all dark stained wood and fingerprint-smudged glass, a line of scratched mirrors lining the far wall. There are wrinkled, threadbare rugs on the floor, worn through in some places by treading feet.

“This doesn’t look so different from Kirkwall,” Hawke says.

“Dive bars are universal,” Fenris agrees, raising his voice to be heard over the general din. “What do you drink?”

“Everything,” Hawke says, which is true.

Fenris elbows his way to a spot at the bar and orders two drinks with words that Hawke doesn’t understand.

“Sazerac,” Fenris tells him, handing him a short whiskey glass full of something dark. “I took a guess.”

“You guessed right,” Hawke says, impressed. He loves whiskey. He wonders for a moment if Fenris is the most perceptive human being to ever exist on earth. “What’ve you got?”

“Dandelion wine,” Fenris answers, and Hawke doesn’t even know what to say because dandelion wine sounds like something that magical elves would drink and it doesn’t surprise him at all that Fenris would drink it.

Hawke finally manages to call “thanks for the drink, I’ll get the next round” before Fenris is disappearing into the crowd, slipping between bodies with lupine grace, his long-stemmed glass held protectively aloft. Hawke follows in his wake like a bull in a china shop, knocking shoulders and muttering apologies as he goes.

There is a small dais in the corner of the bar, raised barely more than a few inches above the floor, on which is stood a battered microphone and a few tangled black cables leading to a squat stack of amps. Fenris takes Hawke’s elbow and pulls them both right to the front, the toes of Hawke’s boots pressed against the edge of the dais, and he’s face to face with a red-haired woman who smiles sadly at Fenris and speaks to him in Orlesian. She’s wearing an incredibly short dress and she has thighs that could probably crush a man’s head like an unfortunate tomato.

She nods to Hawke, says “hello” in a heavy accent without introducing herself, then picks up a guitar and plucks a few strings while sipping her own wine. Someone whoops and the girl raises her glass in acknowledgment.

Fenris tugs at his sleeve and Hawke bends down slightly. “Leliana,” Fenris says into his ear. “I met her when I first came to Val Royeaux. She’s usually friendlier, but she just had her heart broken, apparently.”

“Oh?” Hawke says, without moving away. He likes the way Fenris’ breath tickles the hair at his temples. The dandelion wine smells sweet.

“Long story.” Fenris shrugs. “She was in love with someone who didn’t love her back. It happens.”

It does happen. Hawke knows. It’s happened to him enough times. Hell, it’s probably happening to him right now.

Leliana has a high, breathy voice that Hawke likes a lot, and he drinks and listens to her sing sad songs while Fenris sways in place to the rhythm and occasionally mouths along to the words. She goes through a litany of instruments, but Hawke’s favorite is a small, round six-stringed thing made of lacquered golden wood that she holds in her lap and she coaxes such lovely bright notes out of it that he gets a little emotional.

Hawke asks Fenris what it is. “A mandolin,” he says.

“You drink dandelion wine and you’re friends with people who can play mandolins,” Hawke says. “Are you magic? Are you an _elf?”_

Whoops. Shit. He’s kind of drunk already.

Fenris tips his head back and laughs, and the smile lingers on his face for a while.

“Maybe in a past life,” he says.


	2. Chapter 2

On day five, Hawke has a printed itinerary of the landmarks and museums and tourist things he’s supposed to do, but he leaves it untouched on his nightstand and meets Fenris at a place that serves Nevarran food. It’s so small that they occupy one of only two tables but the food is incredible, spicy and rich, and they eat off each other’s plates as if they’ve been friends for years. Fenris chain-smokes and teaches him how to insult people in Orlesian.

“ _Ta gueule,_ ” Fenris says. “ _Shut the fuck up,_ more or less. Extremely useful. Best utilized while yelling and making a rude gesture.”

Hawke nods, knowing there’s no way he’ll remember that.

“And if you _really_ hate someone, you can tell them to go fuck themselves with _vas te faire foutre._ Of course, you’ll probably get your ass kicked, but it’s usually worth it.”

When their plates are almost licked clean and Hawke thinks he could very happily die here in this chair lolling like a beached whale, he asks, “What do you do? Like, for a job.”

Fenris grins and spreads his hands wide. The cigarette between his teeth bounces as he speaks. “Nothing.”

“Ooh, a layabout, how romantic,” Hawke teases, wondering if it would be rude to unbuckle his belt and release the food baby currently gestating uncomfortably in his stomach.

“Hardly,” Fenris says, still grinning. “I do odd jobs here and there, but I’m beholden to no one. I owe no one my time or my labor. When I left Tevinter, I promised myself as much.”

“Tevinter? Is that where you’re from?” Hawke says.

“It is.” Fenris pushes a last neglected morsel of food around on his plate. “I left a long time ago and I don’t intend to go back.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Because I wanted to. Why did you leave Lothering?”

“My dad died,” Hawke says with easy honesty. “And then my sister. It became harder to stay once they were gone. By the way, you’re very good at deflecting questions but unfortunately for you I’ve been told I am infuriatingly persistent.”

“Or just infuriating,” Fenris says, but he’s looking at Hawke with gentleness. “Tell me. What do _you_ do?”

Hawke makes a face. “You’d be ashamed of me. I work in an office -- I wear a tie every day and I staple lots of things.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“I…” Hawke trails off, thinking about his answer. No, he doesn’t love it, but he does love being able to pay his rent and buy drinks for Varric and purchase endless squeaky toys for his dog. “It could be worse.”

“What would you rather be doing? If you woke up tomorrow with no obligations, no debt, no sense of complacency... What would you do instead?”

“I don’t know,” Hawke says, resisting the urge to squirm. He never thinks about questions like this because the answers always make him sad that it’s not real. He knows he should _use_ that sadness to propel him toward achieving some kind of greater, more fulfilling dream than wearing a tie and stapling paper, but he doesn’t know what that dream would even look like. Him frolicking in a field surrounded by happy dogs, maybe.

Fenris stubs out his cigarette. “You do know. Think about it; you’ll find it.” He stands up and beckons Hawke to follow, letting the subject drop, and the two of them amble out into the street.

Midsummer in Orlais is made up of long days, and sunshine so warm and heavy it feels like a blanket. They head down to the river and Hawke asks Fenris to take a picture of him on the bridge overlooking the water -- he’s sure this bridge was on Merrill’s list of landmarks to visit and he wants to send her the photo to let her to know he’s thinking of her, even if he left that list back at the hotel.

Fenris snaps the picture on Hawke’s phone, and then asks Hawke to send it to him, too.

“Really? Why?” Hawke asks, scrolling through his texts to find Merrill’s name. He’s both flattered and confused by the request.

“Memories,” Fenris tells him with a crooked smile. “I collect them, I guess.”

“You collect pictures of strange men standing on bridges?”

“Among other things, yes.” Fenris leans over the balustrade and peers into the blue-green water, tiny waves cresting along its surface. “I don’t want to forget anything, even the little stuff.”

Hawke leans out next to him. Their elbows nearly graze. “I’ve got a terrible memory, too. I’m constantly forgetting or losing things. My mother used to tell me I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders, which is sort of a morbid thing to say to a six-year-old, but she wasn’t wrong.”

“Hmm.” Fenris leans his chin on his crossed wrists. He stares sidelong at Hawke through a veil of white hair, quiet and contemplative, before he talks. “You asked me why I left Tevinter."

There's a long stretch of quiet filled only with the soft sound of the water.

"I left," Fenris sighs, "because I couldn’t let that place destroy me. The only way I could stay sane living there was if I drank too much, smoked too much, and suppressed the misery under a heavy layer of drugs. So that’s what I did.”

Hawke doesn't speak. He looks at the delicate curl of Fenris' fingers on the chipped granite balustrade. He listens.

“I lost years of my life to Tevinter -- years of myself. I was so fucked up that I don’t remember anything. None of it. There’s just this big, yawning blank space. Sometimes memories will come back in little fragments, but they’re not the kind of memories you want to keep.” He gestures outward at the bridge, the river, the White Spire shining in the sunlight. “So I’m replacing them with new ones. Better ones.”

“You should let me take a picture of you too, then,” Hawke says after a few beats of silence where he breathes in the smell of the water and of Fenris. “Add it to your memories.”

A smile blooms slowly on Fenris’ mouth, a wide, beaming one that lights up his face. Hell, it lights up the whole fucking city, as far as Hawke is concerned. He notices for the first time that Fenris has a dimple on his cheek, on the left side. He doesn’t think he’s seen it before, and yet once it appears, it’s like he knew it was there all along.

In the picture, Fenris’ eyes look blue-green like the color of the river and the wind is whipping his hair around his face. His single dimple is like the North star; Hawke could orient his entire universe around it.

Hawke texts it to Isabela later.

 _goddamn,_ she responds appreciatively. _are you gonna fuck that?_

 _NO,_ he says and turns off his phone.

 

\---

 

Hawke can’t remember which day of the vacation he’s on by now. He thinks it’s nine or ten, but it’s getting harder to keep track -- he’s not following any kind of logical schedule anymore and he’s completely abandoned his tourist guides. Instead, Fenris texts him nearly every morning (or afternoon, sometimes evening, usually depending on how much drinking they did the night before) and asks, _what do you want to see today?_

Sometimes Fenris is busy, because he’s a normal human with a life that doesn’t revolve entirely around Hawke, which is disappointing. When that happens, Hawke roams the city, exploring its secret places in an intimate way that he never bothered to explore Kirkwall. He gets a cafe au lait from that bistro that Fenris likes so much and it is definitely the best one he’s ever had, although he is also pretty sure he’s never had a cafe au lait before.

He learns a few words of Orlesian, too, so he can fend for himself in basic interactions. _Yes, no, please, thank you._ When Hawke first manages to purchase something by himself with almost no miming, charades, or guesswork, he wishes his mother were there to see him because then he wouldn’t have to be proud all by himself.

The thing he purchased was a little plastic keychain, a tacky souvenir charm of a rubbery-looking croissant with VAL ROYEAUX printed on it in neon text. It’s for Varric, to help him evoke the majesty and elegance of Orlais when he’s writing on his blog about Hawke’s adventures, as he will inevitably do. It’s also for Varric because Varric fucking hates kitschy tourist bullshit like that.

On one of these days where he’s alone, Hawke passes by a theater -- a real one, plastered with posters of serious-looking actors and advertisements for stage plays and operas. Hawke thinks about how he’s never been to an opera before, and how he’s doing a lot of things he’s never done before on this vacation, which is how he ends up buying two tickets to a show called _The Tale of the Champion_ and texting Fenris about it afterwards.

 _Have you ever seen an opera? I haven’t,_ he says.

 _I don’t think I have either, actually,_ Fenris responds.

Hawke sends him a picture of the two tickets along with the message _would you like to?_

Fenris says that he would, and Hawke feels very suave. He wonders if Fenris smiled when he saw the picture. He browses the stacks in a fancy bookstore, looking at all the books he can’t read, and thinks about Fenris’ dimple.

 _By the way,_ Fenris texts him a few minutes later, _they won’t let you into the Grande Royeaux theater wearing jeans._

Hawke panics.

Jeans are the only thing he has. Despite the time difference and the cost, he calls Isabela, because the last time he ever tried to look good for someone was several years ago and also a disaster.

“You can’t go wrong with black,” Isabela says, her voice slightly staticky as it travels across distance. “Black is sexy.”

“I can’t do that -- he wears black,” Hawke moans. “That’s his thing.” He glances and down the high street helplessly. There are dozens of stores, but everything inside them is made for people who are slimmer than Hawke and in a much higher tax bracket. He nearly split one of the linen jackets he tried on because of his stupid shoulders and then he had to wrestle it off his body as discreetly as possible. Subtlety is not Hawke’s forte. It was a nightmare.

“What level of fancy are we aiming for?” Isabela asks.

Hawke hears ice cubes clinking in a glass and he imagines she’s lying on her couch drinking a rum and coke while reading a trashy romance novel and shopping for weird shit on Amazon. He misses her a little bit.

“I don’t know,” Hawke confesses, slightly frantic. “I mean, it’s called the _Grande Royeaux,_ so I feel like… probably pretty fancy.”

“Okay, well, first of all, your sexy grandpa needs to take a picture of whatever you end up in, because I think the fanciest thing I’ve ever seen you wear was one of those fucking tuxedo t-shirts,” Isabela says. “Second of all --”

“He’s not a grandpa,” Hawke mumbles.

“ _Second_ of all, stick to the basics. Dark colours. Some nice pants, neutral shirt, and a tie. You’re an amateur, so we’ll play it safe this time,” she says. “You can do it, darling. I’ll be there in spirit, cheering you on. Send photos!”

Isabela makes kissy noises at him before she hangs up -- a longstanding habit she developed solely because it grossed out Aveline -- and Hawke wanders, lost and alone, into another store. This one is more affordable but the only thing that fits him are a pair of socks.

He tries again at another place, and then a third, and finally comes upon merciful providence. A handsome man with a trimmed mustache takes one look at Hawke, raises his eyebrows, and lovingly waves him over to a section that is probably where Orlesians go when they need to buy a shirt for their pet bear.

Mustache retreats, lurking in the background while Hawke tries to follow Isabela’s advice, but he can’t help but feel like he’s misinterpreting “basic” as “boring.” Mustache isn’t having it.

“ _Non,_ ” he chides, gently releasing Hawke’s stranglehold on his third pair of brown pants.

And so that’s how Hawke spends an afternoon stumbling in and out of a fitting room while Mustache hands him various slacks and shirts, prompting Hawke to twirl so he can fully appraise his own work. Most of it is hideous. Hawke snaps a photo of himself in a flamingo-pink shirt. Mustache is perpetually unsatisfied, and he sends Hawke back into his tiny fitting room prison with more clothing over and over.

“This one is good,” Hawke finally says, stopping in front of the full-length mirror, his hair completely out of control and his face a little sweaty. He was sort of saying it just because if he had to try on another pair of slacks his spirit would break, but he was also sort of saying it because it _was_ good. Grey pants that fit him like they were cut to his body, a dark poplin button-up that hugged his shoulders, and a slim tie. Hawke wore ties all the time, but this one made him feel a lot cooler than the ones he wore to work.

Mustache slowly nods and Hawke nods back, and victory music starts playing on loop in his head. _Level up!_

As he leaves the store, he’s glad he doesn’t understand the exchange rate in Orlais because he has a hunch that he just spent an irresponsible amount of money.

 _You’re gonna shit when you see what a magnificent stallion I am,_ he texts Isabela before he goes back to his hotel and falls asleep until it’s time to leave.

When Hawke’s alarm goes off an hour later, he feels hungover. He drags his broken body into the shower, lathers his hair, and gets shampoo in his mouth when he yawns. Shopping is a fucking Olympic sport and he is never doing it again.

His suffering is completely worth it, though, when he meets Fenris outside the Grande Royeaux.

Orlais is crazy about the whole midsummer thing, with festivals and outdoor music and late-night parties. The city is decorated, too: colorful paper streamers and -- Hawke’s favorite -- long garlands of white lights strung everywhere. They cast a diffuse glow over the sidewalk where Fenris is leaning against a brass street lamp, smoking a cigarette. He’s taking a picture of the ornate filigree on the steps of the theater, and his hair catches the soft light like a halo. He looks like a painting, the kind Hawke would linger in front of for too long at a museum.

As he gets closer, Hawke whistles to get his attention, and when Fenris sees him, he does a double-take and Hawke’s ego swells so large that it threatens to punch its way out of his body.

“You look different,” Fenris says.

“Like a real adult, you mean?” Hawke asks.

“Almost.” Fenris grins and nods toward the wide glass doors of the theater. “Ready to expand your cultural horizons?”

Inside, everything is crushed velvet. It’s insane. Hawke has never seen anything like it. The walls are swathed in it, there are massive, heavy drapes of it over the marble archways -- even the ushers are wearing velvet jackets. A crystal chandelier hangs from the domed stucco ceiling and Hawke tips his head back to stare at it as they walk toward their seats.

“This place looks… expensive,” Hawke says.

“Probably because it is,” Fenris replies.

The lights dim and they sit down. Everything hushes. Fenris’ knee touches his.

The tickets kind of cost a lot, and this is a new experience, so Hawke knows he should be paying attention. The set designs are gorgeous and elaborate, the singing is lovely, and the actors seem very passionate about their craft so really it’s just disrespectful that Hawke barely even looks at any of it the entire time.

Fenris stares resolutely ahead, looking as though he at least is appreciating the artistic value of theater, while Hawke studies him out of the corner of his eye.

Exactly as Hawke predicted, he’s dressed in all black. His shirt is buttoned up to his throat and Hawke wonders if it’s an attempt to hide some of his tattoos. Is he ashamed of them? Hawke hasn’t asked about them only because he doesn’t know quite what to ask. He wants to, though. There are a lot of things he wants to ask Fenris.

Like: what happened in Tevinter? What do you dream about? What makes you happy? Where is your family? Are you a top or a bottom?

“Shit,” Hawke mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose. _Cut it out, pervert. You don’t even know if he’s into dudes._

“You all right?” Fenris whispers.

Hawke straightens up and nods. Eyes forward. He manages, for a while. Fenris shifts in his seat and their knees rub against each other and Hawke’s stomach flips.

_Please, Maker, Andraste, whatever -- please, don’t let me throw up._

The house lights go on suddenly and Hawke blinks, taking a deep breath to calm his traitorous gut. “Is it… over?” he asks.

Fenris laughs. “Not yet. Intermission. Come outside with me -- I need a smoke.”

The sky is a deep, inky black peppered with tiny stars and the sidewalk is crowded. Fenris huddles next to Hawke for a moment and they don’t really speak, until Fenris says uncertainly, “Do you want to go?”

“Huh?” Hawke asks.

“Do you want to leave? You didn’t seem like you were very interested in it,” Fenris says. “I don’t mind leaving.”

“No!” Hawke says. “No, I like it. It’s fine. We can stay. Unless… Do _you_ want to go?”

They bicker, trying to pass the buck over and over, until finally Fenris tosses his cigarette into a puddle at the curb and says, “Fuck it, let’s go. We’re not classy enough for this shit anyway. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink, pay you back for the ticket.”

Hawke refuses to let Fenris order the drinks when they finally pick a place to moor themselves. “No, I can do it,” he says, leaning confidently over the bar. “I speak Orlesian now.”

Fenris ends up having to order their drinks anyway but he pats Hawke on the back and tells him he did a good job. Hawke thinks his cognac tastes like failure. His shoulder feels nice where Fenris touched him, though.

 _You are embarrassing,_ he tells himself.

Toward the end of the night, he drunkenly starts slapping his hand on the table for emphasis while he speaks until Fenris gets fed up and just leans on his entire arm to keep it immobile, and Hawke smiles into white hair.

“Fuck!” he gasps, suddenly remembering. “I forgot to take a photo.”

“A photo of what?” Fenris asks.

“Of me! For Isabela! I want her to see how handsome I am.” Hawke pats his pockets with his free hand, looking for his phone.

“You _do_ clean up well,” Fenris says, still pressed loosely against Hawke. “Who’s Isabela?”

“I can’t even explain,” Hawke says, laughing. How does one describe a force of nature in hot pants? “Isabela is… She’s ridiculous. Beautiful. Amazing. She can drink me under the table and she’s half my size. I love her.” He sighs deeply; the room spins a little bit and he lets his head loll back against the chair. “I wish she was here.”

He knows he’s being completely maudlin, but he can’t help it. He really does love Isabela.

Fenris pulls away, giving Hawke’s arm back to him, and Hawke unearths his phone. He’s too lazy and probably too drunk to stand up, so instead he takes a selfie with the biggest smile he can possibly manage, because he’s happy. He went to the opera, even if he didn’t actually _see_ the opera, and Fenris said he did a good job, and he didn’t throw up once.

 

\---

 

Hawke falls asleep in a cocoon of starched blankets and dreams about being a kid in Ferelden, but it’s not the childhood he remembers -- his childhood was full of videogames and afternoons sleeping in the hammock on the back porch and spraying the twins with a hose.

The one he dreams about is spent in a drafty house, hand-built, the cracks between the floorboards filled with old mud; there’s a decaying barn outside and a small coop of skinny chickens. Hawke shares a tiny room with Carver and Bethany and they sleep on pallets stuffed with hay and down. His mother sits by the hearth and sings lullabies to the twins while his father paces vigilant by the door, waiting and listening for something. Garrett doesn’t know what.

Distantly, he hears the clank and clatter of armor, and Malcolm stops pacing. His mother stops singing. Little Bethany begins to cry quietly, and Hawke wishes he could save them.

 

\---

 

The next morning, Hawke blearily looks at his phone. It’s almost eleven and no text from Fenris -- they must have had a lot to drink last night. Or maybe he’s busy today, though he didn’t mention it. Hawke sends him an apology: _sorry if I ruined your opera experience -- I think I’m not cut out for high art._ He adds a little smiley face.

He scrolls through his photos from yesterday, looking for good ones to send to everyone back in Kirkwall, and comes across his blurry selfie from the bar last night after they escaped the Grande Royeaux. He’s got the biggest, stupidest shit-eating grin on his face and you can’t even see what he’s wearing, which was the whole point of the photograph in the first place... but Hawke-From-12-Hours-Ago just looks so fucking _gleeful_ that Hawke-From-Right-Now buries his face in his pillow to muffle his laughter.

Fenris is in the picture, too, Hawke notices when he looks at it a second time. Just barely -- he’s pulling out of the frame, his mouth a flat line, in direct contrast to Hawke. He looks uncomfortable and annoyed.

 _Fuck,_ Hawke thinks, happiness fizzling out immediately as he looks at Fenris’ little scowl. _Fuck, was he that upset? Did I really ruin his night? He was the one who decided we should leave! I can’t believe I didn’t notice!_

_Great job, Garrett._

He docks himself fifty points from the score he only just started keeping right now and then texts Fenris again. _I’m really sorry. Let me make it up to you somehow._

There’s no response. Hawke lies amongst his blankets, not wanting to leave his nest. His fingers twitch with the urge to text Fenris, but he controls himself by turning on the hotel TV and flipping through the channels.

Suddenly lonely, Hawke realizes he is starting to really, really miss his dog.

 _Call me on Skype,_ he texts Aveline. _I want to say hi to Lola._

A second later he makes sure to add, _And you, because we are friends and I care about you._

 _Nice save,_ Aveline responds.

Hawke sits barefoot on the bed wearing a hoodie and sipping coffee from the hotel cafe. His laptop is balanced on his knees while he listens to Skype make that purring sound it does when it’s calling someone. Eventually, Aveline’s face appears -- or half of her face, the lower half mostly, as she messes with the webcam.

“Can you see me?” she shouts as though she’s trying to project her voice directly into Orlais. She’s not good at technology.

“I can hear you, too,” Hawke confirms. “Inside voice, Aveline.”

She whistles through her teeth and there’s a mighty scrabbling of paws and suddenly a giant wet nose obstructs the camera.

“Lola!” Hawke gasps. “My darling child!”

Lola cocks her head at the camera, one ear flopping to the side, then starts sniffing around, trying to figure out where Hawke’s voice is coming from. There’s the sound of things falling over and Aveline pulls Lola halfway into her lap to prevent further destruction. The dog huffs happily and licks her fingers, Hawke forgotten.

“So disloyal,” he says. “I didn’t raise you to be this way.”

“How is Val Royeaux?” Aveline asks, tugging on Lola’s ear affectionately.

“It’s an adventure.” Hawke doesn’t know how else to describe it. “The food is delicious. I can almost hear myself getting fatter. I miss Lola, though.”

“I’m sure she misses you, too,” Aveline tells him, “but she’s settling in well here at the house. I know you take her to that dog park all the time but I think she really enjoys having a backyard to play in. She and Kip get on like a house on fire, too.”

Kip was Aveline’s dog, a big black lab that was the best-behaved animal Hawke had ever met, even though she spoiled him incessantly. Lola, in comparison, was a terrorist.

“You think I should get a second dog to keep her company?” Hawke says. “Maybe she’ll stop eating my couch.”

“That is a terrible idea and you know it,” Aveline says, shaking her head. “You work too much and you don’t spend enough time with her. Lola pees on your stuff and chews on your furniture because she’s _bored_ , Hawke. Another dog won’t fix that, it’ll just mean twice as much of your stuff will have pee on it.”

Hawke is chagrined. He didn’t call Aveline just to get lectured, even if she’s right. Actually, the fact that she _is_ right makes it even more annoying.

“I know,” he says, idly picking at the blanket. “I should just quit that job.”

The thought comes out of nowhere and it spills from his mouth before he even really realizes what he’s said. He wonders what it would be like to live in Orlais. He wonders what Fenris is doing. Hawke’s desire to check his phone is overwhelming.

Aveline _pff_ s a little laugh. “That’s what everyone’s been telling you for years.”

“It’s not like I have a host of exciting opportunities lined up, though,” he mutters. “I don’t even know what I would _do_ if I actually quit.”

“Play with your dog more,” Aveline says, and Hawke sighs dramatically. She continues, “When you were a kid, did you ever dream about being an astronaut, or… I don’t know, a policeman?”

“I wanted to be a dragon,” Hawke tells her. “I _still_ want to be a dragon.”

Aveline’s gaze goes slightly unfocused and Hawke knows that’s because in her head she’s counting to ten. “Okay,” she says, trying again. “Did you ever dream about being something within the realm of possibility?”

Hawke hems and haws a little bit. He did have dreams and aspirations and desires as a kid, but he buried them all because he couldn’t stand thinking about how disappointed 10-year-old Garrett would have been by the person he ended up being.

“I wanted to be around animals, I guess,” Hawke says finally. “I thought about becoming a veterinarian for a while, when I was trying to pick schools. But I don’t know -- I lived on a farm when I was little, and my dad knew a lot about husbandry, so I probably just wanted to be like him.”

“Maybe,” Aveline says, “but when you think about it now, does it still feel like something that would make you happy?”

He has no idea what would make him happy. He’s spent a lifetime deliberately avoiding the question, so he shrugs and shakes his head.

On the other side of the screen, Aveline’s watch beeps an alarm, and Lola’s ears perk up. Her tail starts slapping the floor loudly.

“Let me see my child again,” Hawke says. “Get her up close to the camera so I can give her a kiss.”

“Sorry, Hawke, I have to go,” Aveline tells him, ignoring his request. “It’s time for everyone’s walkies.”

The trigger word has been uttered and chaos is unleashed: Lola hears _walkies_ and flings herself off of Aveline, barking and hopping. Even Kip joins in the ruckus from his spot where he was politely sleeping off-camera. Aveline wades through the swirling mass of dog, shouting her goodbyes to Hawke, and ends the call. The hotel room feels quiet and empty.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s somewhere around day fifteen, and Fenris has been completely silent. Hawke doesn’t let it bother him at all and he certainly doesn’t write sad half-finished texts to Fenris every night that he never sends, asking what he did wrong. Instead, he’s rededicated himself to Merrill’s list of sightseeing locations with vigor anew.

His beloved boots finally give up the ghost and, after reciting a silent eulogy and throwing their corpses in the trash, he buys a new pair made of soft brown leather with thick soles and braided laces. He breaks them in while walking around the exorbitant gardens of the Imperial Palace and gives himself a blister, so he babies out and takes a cab back to the hotel. He got a lot of pictures of flowers for Merrill first, though, which he excitedly sends her.

 _Did you know,_ Merrill texts him, _there are species of orchids in the royal gardens that exist nowhere else on earth?_

Hawke didn’t even know that flowers _had_ species.

 _It must be kind of lonely, don’t you think?_ she says. _Being the only one of your kind in the whole world? How sad!!!_

 _There were lots of other flowers around,_ Hawke reassures her. _The orchids didn’t seem lonely to me._

 _Well, did you ask?_ Merrill says.

Hawke stares out the backseat window and thinks about that for a while. He thinks about how he spent every minute at the Imperial Palace wishing Fenris had been there with him. When he gets up to his room, he sits on his bed and puts a band-aid on his blistered heel. He searches for Fenris’ number.

Fenris picks up on the third ring.

“Hawke?” He sounds confused. Hawke has never actually called him before.

“Hi,” Hawke says, and then hesitates, because he didn’t actually get any further than this in his plan. His mouth does something stupid. “Are you lonely?”

_Dock another fifty points if you would be so kind, scorekeeper._

It’s silent for a moment and Hawke imagines dying and being dead. Then Fenris chuckles a little.

“Sometimes. It’s hard to make and keep friendships when you drift the way I do.” His voice is sonorous, even coming out of the tiny speaker next to Hawke’s ear. “Why? Are you?”

“Sometimes,” Hawke echoes, leaning his elbows on his knees, sitting at the foot of his bed and staring at the ugly patterned carpet under his toes. “I have friends in Kirkwall -- good friends, people that I love. They’re like my family, really. I’ve been missing them a little bit, which I suppose is normal.”

“Hmm.” Fenris sighs quietly in assent. “Are you calling because you miss them?”

“No, I’m calling because I miss _you_.” Hawke stands up and stretches his legs, thrumming with nervous energy. He starts pacing the little box of his room. “You’ve spoilt me, honestly. I got to see so much of you for so many days, and now all of Val Royeaux has _you_ stamped on it; I don’t want to explore without you. And I don’t know if you’re busy, or… or if you’re angry because I don’t like opera, or if you just got tired of my terrible jokes, but I’m sorry, for -- I don’t know, for all of it, whatever it is, and I want to see you.”

He’s a little dizzy after that. He reminds himself to take a breath. He hadn’t meant to say all of that -- he’d barely meant to say _any_ of it -- but once it started, it wouldn’t stop. He’s still pacing.

“Was that too much?” Hawke asks, a little strained, when Fenris says nothing.

“Hawke.” When Fenris speaks, his voice is inscrutable and Hawke wishes he were here so that he could see his green eyes and his crooked smile. “I enjoy your terrible jokes and I don’t give a shit about opera.”

“But you’ve been slipping through my fingers for almost a week now,” Hawke says.

He hears rustling and the sound of a door closing. Is Fenris at home? He realizes he doesn’t know where Fenris lives. He knows so much about him; he also knows almost nothing.

“I needed... space,” Fenris tells him, haltingly. “Just for a few days.” It doesn’t sound like he’s going to offer any further explanation.

“Space is good. I understand space.” Hawke digs his toes into the carpet to stop himself from wearing a hole in it and takes a deep breath that comes out in a heavy rush of air. “Just -- just tell me if you’re going to drop off the face of the earth, all right? Even if you send a carrier pigeon that says _fuck off Hawke_ , that’s good. Stop laughing! I’m very serious! Just _tell_ _me,_ so I’m not sitting here with my thumb up my ass, wondering what I’ve done to ruin this.”

Laughter fading to somberness, Fenris murmurs, “You haven’t ruined anything. No -- you’re right; I suppose the least I could have done was tell you that I… I tend to disappear, occasionally. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Fenris counters immediately, and Hawke snorts, because it’s so _Fenris_. “I’m just… I’m not used to it, Hawke. I’m not used to having to think about other people. I know how that makes me sound, but it’s the truth; I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone who cared enough to call me out when I disappear.”

“Well, here it is, it’s happening,” Hawke announces, flopping back down on his bed gracelessly. In his head, he adds _“occasionally elusive”_ to his list of adjectives that he’s written about Fenris. “This is me calling you out. I’m doing it because I like your company, Fenris. I enjoy being around you, and I have three weeks left here in Orlais and I’d very much like to spend most of it with you, if you’ll let me.”

“Three weeks?” Fenris asks.

“Give or take,” Hawke says. “Twenty-odd days. I can’t remember.”

“And then what? When your time is up, what will you do?” Fenris’ voice sounds like sandpaper on dry wood.

“I’ll go home, as one usually does at the end of a holiday, and make everyone at the office jealous with my wild stories,” Hawke tells him. He punches down the sadness until he’s fairly sure it won’t choke him. “I’d, uh, like to stay in touch, though. If you want.”

Fenris doesn’t answer for a minute, and Hawke plays with a loose thread at the hem of his shirt, wrapping it around his finger over and over until it breaks. Finally Fenris asks, “Have you seen the red light district yet?”

 

\---

 

“I don’t know what the seedy underbelly of Kirkwall is like,” Fenris tells him as they walk along one of the back streets, “but maybe you should prepare yourself for this one.”

It’s close to midnight, but above and all around them wafts music and snatches of conversation and the smell of frying food. It’s so muggy that Hawke feels like he’s swimming in his own sweat and even Fenris appears to be lightly perspiring, which is shocking. The pavement is soft under Hawke’s boots like it’s melting; cafes prop their doors open to let in some sad semblance of a breeze and every window is thrown wide.

“Prepare myself for what?” Hawke asks, apprehensive. “Potential biohazards?”

Fenris rolls his eyes and brushes his hair back from his forehead. He’s wearing a tank top, the sleeves cut out wide and messy with a pair of scissors, and every time he lifts an arm and exposes a stretch of smooth, tattooed skin, Hawke feels like he might honestly keel over and die.

 _This is my life now,_ Hawke laments. _Sneaking glances at the armpits of beautiful men. Don’t look at me, Dad._

“It’s nothing like that,” Fenris is saying. “This is Orlais, after all -- even their whorehouses are clean. It’s more like… Well, the district has been left to mostly run itself, and there’s a lot of money going in and out. So it kind of naturally developed to be pretty ostentatious.”

“‘Ostentatious’ sounds like a polite way of saying ‘terrifying,’” Hawke says, “or am I wrong? Please feel free to tell me I’m wrong.”

He can almost _feel_ it as he crosses the line between Val Royeaux proper and the red light district: it’s as though suddenly everything is a hundred times brighter and more gaudy and there are feathers everywhere. Each side of the street is lined with flashing neon signs and giant storefronts advertising every possible permutation of the word “sex.” Most of the buildings are open to the night air and when Hawke passes by, the bass is so loud he can feel it rattling the fillings in his teeth. There are naked women and men dancing or lounging in the windows of most of the buildings.

Fenris seems entirely unperturbed. He’s watching Hawke and grinning.

“Come on,” he prompts when Hawke falls behind.

“Okay, so,” Hawke says, jogging to catch up, “not to make it weird or anything, but I just saw a lady’s entire vagina.”

“Welcome to the part of Val Royeaux that no one ever talks about,” Fenris says and leads him into a smoky, darkened strip club. It’s loud inside but not crowded, and while it’s too dark to see much, Hawke is surprised that it doesn’t look terribly different from any other grimy bar that he’s ever been in (and he’s been in many). This is another new experience on the list -- he never had any interest in visiting a strip club, so he always just assumed they were the sweaty, writhing mess of nudity and debauchery that he saw in movies, but he only counts two pairs of bare breasts and nobody else seems very interested in them.

“This is kind of underwhelming,” Hawke says, stooping a little so Fenris can hear him. “I was expecting something more like a bacchanalian orgy.”

“We only stopped in here because I know the guy working the bar,” Fenris tells him. “The cheap drinks are worth the sad atmosphere.”

“Wait, what?” Hawke follows Fenris, willing himself not to stare at anyone, but he’s so curious about the kind of people who would hang out at a strip club for fun. “How do you know him?”

Fenris glances over his shoulder. “When you land in a new city with no money and no place to sleep, you can end up in some fucked-up situations. He saved my ass a few times.”

A part of Hawke flinches to hear this, to think about Fenris being hurt by anyone, or feeling afraid or alone. He wishes he could reach out and protect past-Fenris, but Fenris has moved beyond the words already, not interested in sympathy or sentimentality.

“And besides,” Fenris says, hopping up on one of the bar stools (Hawke notices his toes hang several inches above the floor and he bites a knuckle to keep from smiling), “he has some good stories.”

It turned out he _did_ have good stories, as well as incredibly strong drinks. His name is Zevran and he is tiny, coming up barely to Hawke’s chest, but he’s built like he could easily ruin your day and he moves like a ballet dancer behind the bar. When he speaks, his voice carries so well that it arrives at Hawke’s ear as if hand-delivered, ringing over the loud music and the chatter of the other customers.

“ _Fenris,_ ” Zevran drawls, throwing his arms wide in delight. “I haven’t seen you for months. I assumed you were dead. You should see the outfit I had planned for your funeral.”

“Was this outfit entirely made of leather, or only partly?” Fenris asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer; he introduces Hawke, and Zevran appraises him carefully for a moment before extending a hand for a handshake. Hawke feels like he’s just been interviewed, reviewed, and hired in the silent split-second that Zevran looked at him. Hawke wonders what kind of fucked-up situations Zevran has saved Fenris from to make him so vigilant.

“Evening,” Hawke says, putting on his most charming grin. “I’ve heard good things about you from Fenris.”

Zevran doesn’t buy the charm but he charms right back anyway. “All lies, I hope. I wouldn’t want anyone to know the truth of my tender, innocent heart.” He pours an obscene amount of vodka into two Collins glasses, adds ginger beer, and drops a fat wedge of lime in each.

Fenris reaches for his wallet and Hawke gives him a _look_ until he relents.

“I have several days’ worth of alcohol consumption to catch up on with you,” Hawke says, “and I’m paying.”

Fenris rolls his eyes.

At Hawke’s request, Zevran tells a story about how Fenris once menaced a drunken patron out of the club. “This nasty little man was touching all the girls,” Zevran says, taking the shot of tequila that Hawke bought for him. Hawke doesn’t know if bartenders are allowed to drink on their shift but Zevran doesn’t seem like the kind of person to follow rules, regardless. “Fenris didn’t even work here, but our bouncers were busy, and I’m stuck behind the bar. So I say to Fenris, ‘show me your best warrior face.’”

“Warrior face?” Hawke asks, crunching an ice cube between his teeth. His drink is empty and Zevran refills it.

“You know,” Zevran says, squeezing lime juice, “the face you make before you are going to rip someone’s heart from their chest and possibly eat it.”

Hawke looks to Fenris, his eyebrows raised. “Can I see this face?”

Fenris chuckles and drops his head into his hands. “I don’t think I can do it anymore,” he says. “I’ve lost my touch.”

Zevran leans his elbows on the bar. “That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah,” Fenris replies, throwing back the last of his drink. “I hardly ever want to rip out anyone’s heart these days.”

“So what happened with the guy? Did you scare him off?” Hawke asks.

“I did,” Fenris says, and even though he’s laughing, he sounds a little bit proud.

“He comes up to this man with his warrior face on, like this…” Zevran draws himself up to his full height (which is still very small) and stalks out from behind the bar with a predatory gait and an icy scowl. “He grabs the man and he says, _You will watch where you put your hands if you want to keep them._ ”

Hawke can’t believe it.

“And then!” Zevran continues, absolutely delighted with himself and his captive audience. “And then he takes this man by the back of his neck and marches him to the door! Like a naughty child!”

“Well, I couldn’t let him _stay,_ ” Fenris protests.

“Everyone, of course, is staring,” Zevran says, ignoring Fenris. “So Fenris turns around very slowly, comes back to the bar, and finishes his drink while staring back at every single one of them until they left.”

“I was…” Fenris shakes his head, his dimple showing. “I was a very angry young man.”

This sends Zevran into peals of laughter.

When they leave it’s past one in the morning, but the streets are even livelier than they had been before. A steady stream of people drifts along the sidewalk and Hawke hears all sorts of different languages being spoken around him. He spots a woman in a leather corset and leading a man around on all fours by a leash, which is normal, and two young men wearing traditional Orlesian masks and nothing else.

“I brought you to Zevran to get you drunk,” Fenris tells him, shouting over someone’s shoulder as they lace their way through the crowd. “But that’s not the reason we’re here.”

“Getting drunk is a pretty good reason for anything,” Hawke says, spinning around to take everything in. The chaos is astoundingly distracting. He blinks and refocuses on Fenris who looks almost gleeful, his cheeks ruddy and his hair disheveled.

Hawke is so glad to see him again.

“Hey, did you know,” Hawke asks apropos of nothing, lightning sparking in his chest, “there are orchids in the Imperial Palace gardens that exist nowhere else on earth?”

Fenris gives him a bemused look, then nods. “I did know that.”

 _What the fuck,_ Hawke thinks. _Why does everyone know about this except me?_

The real reason they’re in the red light district is, apparently, a dance club. Or _a discothèque,_ Fenris says sarcastically while he pushes his way to the end of a queue leading to the door of a windowless club. He leans one shoulder against the wall and lights a cigarette and his movements are uneven -- Zevran put a _lot_ of vodka in those drinks.

“So, um,” Hawke says a little anxiously, glancing up and down the line of people ahead of them. “Dancing. I don’t really… do that. At all.”

Fenris smirks, exhaling smoke. “I figured. That’s why I got you drunk first.”

Everything is terrible and Hawke is an idiot and he can’t believe he agreed to this, agreed to anything that Fenris ever suggested, because now he has to _dance_. Fenris drags him through the queue, past the bouncer, and beyond the doors and they are both strutting drunkenly to the massive dance floor.

He didn’t expect this place to be so _opulent_ \-- it’s a far cry from the bare walls and flickering neon of the strip club. It’s fucking packed, first of all, people clustered around the bar and lining the walls and dancing with each other. The ceiling is domed and ornate, painted a rich, deep red and lit from below. There are balconies traveling up several storeys, populated by people holding drinks, leaning over the railings and staring down at the dance floor.

Hawke realizes why it looks familiar. “This place was a theater, wasn’t it?” he wonders aloud. “It looks like the Grande Royeaux.”

“Because it used to _be_ the Grande Royeaux,” Fenris says. “Before it became the red light district, this was the arts district. Most of the buildings around here were originally art galleries and theaters, from what I’ve been told.”

“What changed?” Hawke asks, craning his neck to look at everything. There are large frescoes painted on the walls and framed with delicate plaster scrollwork, but it’s too dark to see the details. Plush chairs are tucked in beneath small tables laid with half-melted candles.

“An entire district of wealthy patrons and starving artists? Surely you can imagine what happens when you condense money and desperation in one place, and all the power imbalance that goes with it.”

Fenris is up on his tip-toes to speak in Hawke’s ear, and when Hawke turns his face to look at him, they are close. The low light makes Fenris’ eyes appear black.

“Oh,” Hawke says dumbly. “You, uh. You know a lot.”

Retreating, Fenris shrugs. “I like collecting memories.”

The crowd thickens the closer they get to the dance floor but Fenris is persistent as he pushes through, his fingers locked around Hawke’s reluctant wrist, and the music is so loud that no one can hear him when Hawke moans sorrowfully, “I don’t know how to dance.”

But the bass thrums in his chest like a second heartbeat and when Fenris releases his hand to raise his own arms in the air and sway his body with a grace that makes Hawke feel unworthy, he can’t help but stumble after him. He doesn’t know what to do with his limbs, but Fenris does: he looks like a fucking vision, columns of smoky light strobing around him, his eyes closed, his hips rolling, the hollow of his throat beaded with sweat.

 _Fuck,_ Hawke thinks, unable to look at anything else. He’s short of breath. _Fuck._ He wants to graze his thumb in that dip in Fenris’ throat, wants to know how his body’s free, easy movement feels against him.

_Fucking hell._

Lids heavy, Fenris opens his eyes and looks at Hawke, then shakes his head, white hair falling in his face. “Don’t just stand there,” he scolds; when Hawke merely gapes at him like a giant deer in headlights, he laughs, his dimple showing, and takes Hawke’s arms. “You’re hopeless. Come on, like this.”

And then he moves _for_ Hawke, rocking to the beat and taking Hawke along with him, and okay, so they’re dancing together. Okay. Hawke does his best to mimic what Fenris is doing but it’s impossible, and he can’t even imagine how stupid he looks, so his movements are stilted and awkward and he regrets every second of his life that has led up to this.

“Maybe,” he starts, “maybe I should just, uh -- stand on the sidelines for a minute --”

Fenris punches him in the chest. “You _have_ to know by now I’m not going to let you do that.”

Of course Hawke knew that, but he was hoping. He wanted to just step back and stare at Fenris without worrying about his own weird, gangly body doing… whatever it was doing.

“Stop,” Fenris says, watching Hawke. He rocks up onto his toes, throws an arm around Hawke’s neck and speaks in his ear, the sound intimate enough to make the room feel small. “Close your eyes and relax. Don’t think, just move. Forget everything.”

Hawke doesn’t want to close his eyes, doesn’t want to stop looking at Fenris, but he does it anyway and he tries to let everything fall away. He hears nothing except the music. He feels the thick heat of the air. He imagines all of his self-doubt withering like an unwatered weed, retreating back beneath the dirt. When he feels Fenris’ hand on his arm again, guiding him, he melts into the touch and follows the lead and moves his body in time with the beat.

Fenris moves with him; Hawke can’t see it, eyes still closed, but he can feel it. There’s enough space between them that Hawke can breathe but they brush each other, occasionally lean in, legs just barely tangling. Songs blur together like liquid, over and over, until Hawke loses track of time entirely.

Fenris’ hands slide down Hawke’s shoulders, trailing through the hair on his forearms.

He imagines being brave enough to uncurl his fist and take Fenris’ hand into his own, pressing their sweaty palms together.

_Don’t think, just move._

He reaches out, tentative fingertips against white ink, and Fenris pulls away.

“I need a drink,” Fenris exclaims. “Stay here.”

Hawke opens his eyes, no longer dancing, and he’s surrounded by dozens of bodies, pressing in on him. Fenris has disappeared entirely in the crush.

Despite the command to stay, Hawke follows in what he imagines is probably, hopefully, the direction of the bar. On the way there, a stranger tries to argue with him in Orlesian about something that Hawke doesn’t understand; he sees a girl, nude except for a pair of cat ears and a long, silky tail, and his face goes hot when he realizes how the tail is attached to her; and a very tall, very beautiful woman in red lipstick grabs him by the shoulders, tips his face back, and presses an enthusiastic kiss to the bridge of his nose.

When he finds the bar, it’s like a mirage appearing in the desert, and the relief is palpable. Fenris is there and he’s talking to someone -- a girl in black boots. They’re arguing, Hawke realizes as he comes closer, so he hangs back.

“Oh, please,” the girl scoffs, her words heavily accented. “At least you’re out of the flat, finally. You’ve been hiding in your room for days.”

Hawke recognizes that voice, and realizes who she is: the musician, the one who played a mandolin and drank wine that first night he spent time with Fenris. Lily? No. Leliana.

“You didn’t leave your bed for two _weeks,_ ” Fenris responds, dropping his empty shot glass back on the bartop with a clatter.

Leliana scowls slightly. “She broke my heart.”

Fenris crosses his arms, but some of the irritation bleeds out of him.

“At least I had a chance with her,” Leliana says after a few beats, raising her glass with a bitter smile. “You’re the one all bent out of shape over a straight boy.”

“Fuck off,” Fenris says, but there’s no acid in it, just a kind of knowing weariness. He laughs, his head dropping forward, and Leliana pats his shoulder with affection, her gaze sympathetic.

Hawke stares.

Leliana’s hand stills when she spots Hawke lingering awkwardly, her drink halfway to her lips.

Fenris follows the line of her eyes and glances back. The outline of his body tightens in surprise. “I told you to stay,” he says.

“Um,” Hawke fumbles, shrugging in apology, “I’m poorly trained.” He leans on the bar, unable to look at Fenris. He knows he intruded on a conversation that he probably shouldn’t have overheard.

“You have something on your face,” Leliana tells him, tapping the bridge of her nose.

For a moment, Hawke has no idea what she’s talking about. He reaches up to touch his face and his fingertips come away smeared with red. “Oh! Oh. Some beautiful woman gave me a kiss but, uh, I think she missed my mouth by a few inches.”

Fenris is staring at him, squinting, his eyes raking over the red mark on Hawke’s face. His lips are slightly parted and he looks confused.

“You okay?” Hawke asks, stuffing his hands in his pockets because he thinks they might be shaking a little bit.

 _If you throw up, I will never, ever forgive you,_ he warns himself. _Never._

“I’m fine,” Fenris says, eyes still narrowed, curious gaze pinning Hawke in place. He reaches out and smudges the lipstick with his thumb across Hawke’s cheek like war paint, and Hawke’s skin tingles at the contact. “I just had the strangest sense of déjà vu.”

He pulls back his hand, shakes his head like he’s dislodging the thought, and looks away.

 

\---

 

The clock on Hawke’s phone reads 4:03 A.M. and every muscle in his body aches a little bit. The heat is still brutal and it’s a hundred times worse underground in the white tiled subway tunnel where Fenris is waiting next to the tracks, his shoulders hunched and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear.

Hawke stands several feet away from him, inspecting the various pieces of graffiti that adorn more or less every single inch of the walls. He spots a spray-painted dick and nearly giggles out loud, about to show it to Fenris, but then he reconsiders.

Neither of them had much to say on the walk to the subway and now they were most definitely avoiding each other.

 _Just ask him,_ his brain bellows. _Fucking say it, you big baby._

Hawke clears his throat and Fenris looks up.

“Hey, um,” Hawke says.

Overhead, the intercom interrupts him, buzzing with static and announcing something about trains, probably.

Hawke waits, writhing in agony, until it goes quiet.

_Say it!_

“So Leliana mentioned something about you -- about, uh, a straight boy. Is that… I mean… are you… Do you enjoy the company of men?” Hawke stutters, because he has to be as awkward as possible at all fucking times.

Fenris frowns at the floor, digging his toe into a spidery crack. He looks up at Hawke with a challenge in his eyes and the tips of his ears are a little pink. “Yes,” he says, decisive. “I do, sometimes.”

“Oh.” _Oh._ Hawke’s breath catches in his throat and the cement under his feet feels unsteady. “I do, too. Sometimes.”

All the time, actually; Hawke is as gay as the day is long. He just hasn’t gotten laid in a while.

Fenris’ mouth opens and closes silently. “You do,” he repeats with intense disbelief. “Does your girlfriend know about that?”

“Uh,” Hawke says, laughing self-consciously. His ears ring as a train screeches into the station next to them. “Well, I would ask her, but… she… doesn’t exist?”

Fenris’ eyes flick over each train car as it passes, shaking his head slightly. His arms hang at his sides, his fingers worrying the hem of his shirt over and over like a rosary. “I thought -- when you mentioned Isabela…”

“What? _Isabela?_ Fucking hell!” Hawke explodes, aghast. He waves his hands. “No, Maker, no. Isabela and I -- even if I wanted to, which I _don’t_ , she’s like a sister. A sister with a drinking problem who somehow leaves her pants on your living room floor every time you invite her over. Fuck, we’re not -- it’s not like that. Not even a little.”

The train doors slide open with a rubbery hiss, and Fenris looks at them and back to Hawke. “This is my train,” he says, wavering. The pink in the tips of his ears has traveled all the way to his cheeks and down his neck. His lip is caught between his teeth.

“Go,” Hawke says, even as he thinks _stay_. He’s grinning in a way that he hopes isn’t terrifying because _wow, Fenris is into dudes_ and stammers, “I’ll… text you. Tomorrow. If you want.”

“Sure,” Fenris says, but the word sounds as though it’s hanging -- as though there’s more he wants to say.

Hawke would wait forever to hear him say it but then the doors close and the train jerks into motion and he watches a bent white head disappear into the black tunnel.

 _Holy shit, I’ve got a fucking story for you,_ Hawke texts Isabela as he’s kicking off his pants and climbing into bed, but he falls asleep before he can tell it to her.

 

\---

 

Hawke dreams about Fenris in a courtyard carved from crumbling limestone. Grim bronze statues ring the plaza, their polished heads bowed in submission. The place is familiar: Kirkwall. Around Hawke’s neck is a ruff of heavy fur and in his hand a twisting wooden scepter, its pommel warm with power.

Fenris is wearing black -- he’s always wearing black -- but this time it’s armor, spiked and terrifying, and he’s hefting a sword twice his size in the air. Surrounding him in a writhing ring are dozens of black-eyed creatures reaching for him with fingers that clutch and yearn, and Fenris cuts them down in a wide swing, the muscles in his arms bunching under white ink. He howls in a language Hawke doesn’t know -- Orlesian? No, something else, a language with sharper edges and an older soul.

Feeling far away, Hawke watches him, the way he dances between bloody bodies with a familiar grace.

“I know you,” Hawke says, but it doesn’t make any sound. “I’ve always known you.”

Chest heaving, Fenris drops his sword and turns around to look at him, and he wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Warden was a dick to Leliana; she's the one who broke her heart. I'm working through my guilt.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is for [liluye](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mouselini/pseuds/liluye) because she was the inspiration for nearly everything in it.
> 
> I commissioned the amazing [Buddens](http://buddens.tumblr.com) to draw some art for this one. I fucking love Buddens and you should too.

 

 

_art by[buddens](http://buddens.tumblr.com)_

 

Day sixteen. Hawke is hungover in each individual part of his body. The world is his enemy. Mid-morning sunlight streams into his room in blinding golden blocks. It’s awful. When his phone chirps at him, he very seriously considers dropping it in a pillowcase full of rocks and drowning it in the nearest river.

 _where is my story?_ Isabela asks. _you told me you had a story!_

 _Yes but right now I’m dying from the later stages of alcohol poisoning,_ he responds. _Please clear my browser history before my mother sees it and make sure my tombstone mentions how virile and muscular I was._

 _rip garrett malcolm hawke,_ Isabela says. _he died as he lived: looking cute and making poor decisions._

Pleased by this eulogy, Hawke puts his phone on silent, drops it on the floor, and goes back to sleep for a while.

When he drags himself back from the brink of death and into consciousness a few hours later, he feels better, in a relative sense. He has about a dozen more texts, all from Isabela, talking about how she’s going to bang his mother at his funeral, which really doesn’t seem fair. He’s in the middle of telling Bela that if she goes near his mother he’ll call the cops all the way from the fucking afterlife when another text pops up. He pauses; it’s from Fenris, and it’s a photo.

Ten white-lined toes peek out from a rumpled swirl of dark blankets. In the background, a casement window is flung open, looking out over the city; a gauzy curtain is messily pinned back to let in the light.  On the floor, a cardboard box spills over with books and vinyl records, and next to it is a heap of black denim. Balanced on the windowsill is a little chipped clay pot with some kind of wilted plant in it, its leaves curling into themselves.

 _Good morning,_ Fenris says.

Hawke stares at the picture for a while. He feels like he is _actually_ going to die, for real this time, as he studies every detail. It’s not the first time he’s gotten a random photo from Fenris -- he’d been sending pictures of frou-frou Orlesian purebreed dogs ever since he realized that Hawke compulsively stopped to pet every single dog he saw on the street -- but it’s the first time he’s gotten one so intimate.

In the back of his head, though, he can hear Merrill clucking sadly over the poor neglected plant.

Sighing, he feels compelled to respond in kind, but he is chagrined to discover that his ridiculous clown feet look like two hairy fence posts sticking out of the pristine white quilt. He broke the littlest toe on his left foot when he was a kid and it healed crooked, and there’s a scabbing blister on his right, and there’s just so much _hair._ He admits defeat with some measure of grace and instead turns the camera on his upper half, then nearly drops the phone on his forehead in surprise.

 _Oh,_ he thinks, tracing the blood-red slash across his nose. _Right._

The red lipstick kiss. Fenris smudging the paint with his thumb.

He remembers, too, their conversation in the sweltering subway tunnel.

Hawke had been too tired to wash his face when he got back to his room last night, falling into bed and passing out as soon as he hit the pillow, and his war paint was still stubbornly in place.

He sends Fenris a picture of his happy, bleary, hungover expression, bedhead like a wild dark shock against the pillow. He even risks a glimpse of chest hair -- just the barest hint of it, a wisp against his collarbone.

 _Water your plant,_ Hawke types.

The response comes a few minutes later and there’s no accompanying message, just a picture of Fenris enthusiastically giving him the middle finger. (Hawke saves it.)

It’s far enough past noon that he feels ashamed when he finally rolls out of bed, but his suffering is considerably lessened. He drinks about forty-seven glasses of water, brushes his teeth twice, and stands in the shower with the temperature just shy of scalding. There are no pressing obligations today, and even if there were, he doesn’t feel like doing them, so he lingers for nearly an hour under the spray, wiping beads of moisture off the glass and thinking about ten little toes and where those white lines of ink might lead him.

 

\---

 

“Stop,” Isabela says, her jaw hanging open. “No. Stop lying to me.”

“Andraste as my fucking witness.” Hawke’s face is buried in his hands.

“He thought I was your _girlfriend?_ Is he blind? Is he losing his vision in his old age?”

“He’s not a grandpa!” Hawke wails, then claps a hand over his mouth as someone turns to look at him. He’s on the patio of a deli, his laptop perched precariously on the tiny table between a plate of fruit and a sweaty bottle of bitter beer -- hair of the dog and all that. He slouches down in his seat a little bit in embarrassment.

Isabela chortles. She’s drinking a gin & tonic with a straw and wearing bunny-print pajamas -- while it’s only 2 p.m. in Val Royeaux, Kirkwall is six hours ahead, and Isabela is typically done wearing clothes by no later than 5. Hawke is glad she has a shirt on, at least.

“So you disabused him of this terrible notion, right?” she asks. “And then, of course, you told him you want to wear his thighs like earmuffs.”

Hawke snorts and then stuffs his mouth with strawberries so he can avoid answering the question. They’ve been friends for long enough that Isabela knows exactly what he’s doing, though, so she sips her gin, crosses her legs primly, and waits.

“Ugh,” Hawke says, swallowing, “yes, I told him that we’re not dating. No, I didn’t tell him... the, uh, other part.”

“Come _on,_ Garrett,” she says, somewhere between encouraging and exasperated.

“No, you don’t understand! He’s... Maker, he’s so...” Hawke stops, picking a strawberry pip out of his teeth with his tongue, staring hard at his hands clasped in his lap. “He’s so far out of my league that he genuinely transcends the entire concept of leagues _._ If you gave me a thousand years, a thousand _lifetimes_ to describe him to you, I still wouldn’t get it all.”

Isabela doesn’t say anything, just sighs, with her beautiful long legs crossed at the knee and her fingers combing through her curls, staring at Hawke like she’s waiting for him to figure out what she already knows.

They idly bullshit for a few minutes longer, Isabela giving him the abbreviated version of the familiar chaos that has continued unabated even in Hawke’s absence: Varric got stoned and tried to shave his chest hair just to prove that he _didn’t_ love it more than Bianca, and he almost sheared off a nipple and had to go to the hospital; Merrill pulled a fire alarm at the library because she thought it was a button you could push to summon librarians; Carver wanted to get a tattoo of a sports car with muscles but Aveline wouldn’t let him because she’s allergic to fun.

“Fuck!” Hawke gasps. “Carver!”

He hasn’t talked to his brother once since he got to Orlais, and the guilt is heavy and immediate. He hangs up on Isabela -- she makes those kissy noises at him before she winks out of existence -- and opens his email. His inbox populates with sterile, boring letters from his coworkers and his boss. The copy machine is broken. Someone keeps stealing lunches out of the communal fridge. Hawke feels a sense of existential dread pushing down on his shoulders as he scans them -- and then suddenly he shrugs, letting it roll off his back like water.

_No one cares about your missing yogurt, Helen. Delete. Empty trash._

His email to Carver is short and a little impersonal but he attaches several pictures and of course makes mention of the way Orlais is absolutely overflowing with scads of gorgeous women in very short shorts. Because, okay, maybe Hawke has no idea how to talk to his little brother but he _does_ know how to get his attention. And anyway, it’s not like Carver was knocking it out of the park, either. They’d barely spoken since Bethany’s death. No -- before that, even.

After draining the last of his beer, Hawke, feeling bold, underhands the empty bottle into a nearby trash can but misses and is forced to bend down, pick it up, and deposit it sheepishly where it belongs.

The white stone bridge branching out over the river is choked with people and he drifts through the scrum until he reaches the far banks. Here, the levees are blanketed by moss and bouquets of tiny blue-throated blossoms straining toward the sky. He plucks a single flower and carries it with him, twirling it between his fingers, as he meanders.

He stops at a garishly-colored stand piled high with tourist bait: shirts airbrushed with pictures of the White Spire, pins in the shape of the Grande Royeaux theater, and useless knickknacks that all advertise the greatness of Val Royeaux in some way. Though Hawke’s hangover has dissipated into barely more than a mild throb behind his temples, the daylight still makes his eyes ache, so he picks up a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses. The arms are stamped with the name of the city but it’s misspelled as _Val Royaue._ Inexplicably charmed by this error, Hawke buys them.

“ _Merci,_ ” Hawke says as he counts out exact change, because he understands the exchange rate now, and dons his sunglasses with pride. “ _Au revoir._ ”

No one pays very much attention to him as he walks; he blends into the crowd of people going about their lives. He passes a couple speaking Orlesian to each other, and if he slows his stride and listens, he realizes he can understand some of it. For a dreamy moment, it feels like he’s not actually a tourist but a native, and he wonders what it would be like to live here.

What would it mean to leave Kirkwall behind, quit his job, find something better?

He would work with his hands, maybe. Something honest, like his father. But he’s too much of a baby for the labor of construction and too impatient for anything exacting like carpentry.

Well, he’s a decent cook, something he learned from his mother. He enjoyed it, and it made him feel proud when he fed his family. Restaurants always need cooks but he’d be a rubbish line cook and an even worse waiter, far too awkward. And if he’s dreaming big, he doesn’t want to own a restaurant either. Maybe he could wheel around one of those little food carts and sell bratwurst to passersby. Living the dream.

What about dogs? He loves dogs! Everyone loves dogs. But you can’t make a living being a dog walker or a dog groomer or a dog sitter. Shit.

It dawns on him with no small amount of distress that even when he does give himself permission to dream big, he _can’t._ He has no idea what he wants. Fenris said he already knew, that he would find it in himself, but he’s digging and coming up empty-handed. He’s been so responsible and so predictable for so long because it was _easy_ \-- and now even in his fantasies he’s boring.

He thinks back to his conversation with Aveline, when she asked him what he dreamed about. When he was younger, he wanted to be a veterinarian. The first years of his life had been spent on a farm, inherited from Malcolm’s parents, and Hawke woke up every morning in the dawn half-light, feeding chickens and petting lambs. He’d helped Leandra deliver a calf once and wept with childish joy when it stumbled over to him on knobby new legs.

But Hawke ended up going to a state school for an MBA and got a shitty desk job because it was the safe, stable, cheap option. He wanted to be able to take care of his family, even as that family started to splinter into pieces. And by the time he’d been working long enough to pay back most of his student loans, he was too deep in inertia to even think about going back to school.

He could have been a good vet, maybe.

 _What if?_ he asks, staring down at the delicate flower in his fingers, letting the question blossom in his chest and shyly turn its face to the sun. _What if?_

 

\---

 

 _What are you doing?_ Hawke asks Fenris on the morning of his seventeenth day on vacation.

 _Sleeping,_ Fenris tells him.

Hawke sends him a little sad face in apology, even though he’s not sorry at all because imagining Fenris curled up in bed sleepily texting him is the highlight of his entire pathetic life. His phone buzzes in his palm.

 _I have to go outside the city today,_ Fenris says. _It’s kind of a pain in the ass to get out there on the metro, but it’s important._

Hawke’s phone tells him Fenris is still writing something, but it’s an unsteady process: he types, starts, stops, erases his words, starts again. Confused, Hawke waits.

After several minutes of struggle, Fenris asks, simply, _Will you come with me?_

 

\---

 

“This is a terrible idea,” Hawke says to himself as he straddles the motorbike and listens to it purr eagerly. He has almost no idea how to drive this thing, but it’s another box ticked on his list of firsts, so he’s game. He fishes his phone out of his back pocket and looks again at Fenris’ last text: his address.

He gets very, very lost, and is very, very late, but Fenris is lounging indolently on the front stoop, smoking and flipping the pages of a yellowed paperback, when Hawke finally rolls to a stop in front of his apartment.

“You --” Fenris blinks once, twice, then laughs out loud. “You rented a _scooter._ ”

“Sure did,” Hawke says, his smile big enough to crack his face. “Better than taking the train, right?”

“It looks like it’s about to fall apart beneath you,” Fenris tells him. He dog-ears his page and tucks the book into his back pocket.

“Yeah,” Hawke says, looking down at the little bike with a degree of sadness. “Orlesians are all so... waifish. I’m not sure these things were built to transport bears.”

“Let alone a bear _and_ his loyal human sidekick,” Fenris says as he mounts the bike and settles in behind Hawke. His thighs are a warm, soft pressure against the back of Hawke’s legs.

The sensation is overwhelming. Hawke wants to scale the side of Fenris’ apartment building and stand on the roof and sing an aria at the top of his lungs. He doesn’t know any arias but he’d learn one. He’s so happy he could scream, or punch the sun, or explode into a thick cloud of glitter.

“You’re my sidekick?” Hawke asks, swallowing all of it and trying to appear composed. His sunglasses slide down his nose a little bit.

“Obviously,” Fenris says. He pushes Hawke’s sunglasses back up with a gentle finger and loops an arm around his waist. The scooter creaks. “Sidekicks always ride behind.”

Beyond the border of the city, acres of farmland undulate toward the horizon. Fenris directs him to a crooked road, barely more than a wide dirt path, that leads to an ornate wrought-iron gate shedding flakes of rust on the grass. Beyond the gate is a whitewashed stone building; it looks almost like a chapel with a peaked steeple and the Chantry’s mark, a shining golden sun, over the heavy arched doors. But there are no pious parishioners -- only a group of dusty children, shrieking and running in wild circles and splashing in a mossy fountain.

Fenris says nothing to Hawke, instead stepping past him to rap at the gate. Several children look up.

One girl rushes out, bleating Fenris’ name happily, and reaches through the iron bars while bouncing on the balls of her feet. She bares her teeth at him in a feral snarl and points to the gap where her two front teeth are missing.

Fenris crouches until they’re at eye-level. “ _Très sauvage,_ ” he compliments her, returning the ferocious grin.

A woman appears and greets Fenris in effusive Orlesian, unlocking the gate and waving them both into the courtyard. She’s wearing jeans and a wide straw hat instead of heavy robes, but Hawke would recognize the serene smile of an Andrastian priest anywhere -- he spent enough time attending services as a child, listening to grey-haired women intoning the Chant of Light at him. But this place isn’t like any chantry he’s ever seen.

A plaque inside the gate, covered in a greenish patina, reads _L’Orphelinat du St-Alain._

“Is this a religious school?” Hawke asks Fenris, brows beetled. “Or some kind of Chantry summer camp?”

“Not exactly,” Fenris says. He looks over his shoulder at Hawke, his expression bittersweet, then bends down and sweeps a waiting little boy into his arms.

They’ve arrived at lunchtime and thus Hawke finds himself on duty: one of the Chantry sisters gives him a ladle and an expectant stare, so now he’s spooning stew into dozens of plastic bowls and distributing crackers to eager hands while Fenris shepherds children to their seats at sticky tables.

“ _Non,_ ” Fenris says, laughing and steering a girl to her own chair after she tries to sit in Hawke’s lap, “ _ici, assieds-toi._ ” _Here, sit._

“It’s okay,” Hawke says, beckoning to her conspiratorially, and the girl scrambles back to his lap, jabbing him with her pointy little elbows and getting cracker crumbs all over his shirt. Hawke beams at Fenris, who rolls his eyes and hides a smile behind the back of his hand.

It all clicks, a little painfully, when Hawke sees the cots lined up in careful rows along the walls, some laden with threadbare stuffed animals, messy crayon drawings taped above little pillows. Arranged beneath every bed are dozens of tiny shoes.

“Oh,” he says. It's not a camp or a school. It’s an orphanage.

He looks up at Fenris, but the children have monopolized him, calling his name, babbling to him, proudly showing off their bruises from playground scuffles or the beetle they found in a bush outside, and Fenris sits patiently and praises them with words so full of love that even Hawke feels it. He accepts pebbles and bits of chalk and scraps of brightly-colored paper with careful hands -- priceless gifts from his tiny admirers.

“They adore you,” Hawke says, speaking around the heavy, warm lump in his chest. “You must visit this place a lot.”

“I do,” Fenris says, perched regally in a child-sized chair as one of the girls lays a misshapen crown of braided dandelions atop his pale hair and pets the tattoos curling over his shoulders. “But you should see the royal welcome that Leliana gets. She always brings her mandolin and sings to the kids. They go fucking _wild_.”

Hawke guffaws, the sound deep and loud in the open space, and the little girl in his lap is delighted. She laughs too, trying to mimic the boom of his voice, and it washes over the assembled audience -- all of the children start giggling and the tractor beam of their attention shifts to Hawke. He follows the herd as they sweep back outside into the courtyard, playing hide-and-seek with them, chasing kids through the tall brush at the edge of the property.

He wrestles in the dirt and teaches a rapt half-circle of children how to whistle through stiff stalks of grass. They climb all over him, shrieking and sticking their grubby fingers in his beard until, with a mighty roar, he rises from the earth, flexing and lifting several kids on each arm; they hang from his limbs like cackling spider-monkeys.

It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that Hawke did these things with Bethany and Carver, roughhousing in their parents’ driveway and catching jars of fireflies, but somehow a depthless gulf has come to separate the past and the present. Hawke’s throat tightens as a girl weaves daisies into his beard, talking at him in Orlesian; she’s a slip of a thing with wild black hair and blue eyes that remind him of his sister. Hawke finds himself wishing he had said something more in his email to Carver than just _Orlais is great, tons of babes, see you soon._

“ _C’est beau,_ ” Hawke says hoarsely when she steps back to survey her work, his beard blooming. _Beautiful._

Fenris, still wearing his flower crown, drops unceremoniously to the ground next to Hawke. He bursts into laughter, pulls out his phone, and presses their shoulders together to take a picture of them both adorned in their frippery.

The curiosity is killing Hawke. “Why do you come here?” he asks.

“Because sometimes even I feel guilty about being a relentless misanthrope,” Fenris says flatly. He’s half-joking -- Hawke recognizes that sarcastic monotone by now -- but it’s circumspect, almost defensive.

“You asked me to come with you,” Hawke reminds him, cocking his head and forcing Fenris to meet his gaze. _I’m here because you wanted me to be. I want to know you._

Fenris studies Hawke, chewing his bottom lip, plucking blades of grass and discarding them, over and over. He pulls his legs up to his chest and rests his chin on one knee.

“I grew up in a place like this,” Fenris says. “I was one of these lost kids.”

His heart twists to hear Fenris confirm what he’d already suspected. “I’m sorry,” he says, breathing the words like they’re breakable.

“I’m not,” Fenris retorts. He tears apart a tender shoot of new grass. “It happened a long time ago. Sorry doesn’t mean anything to me, or to them. What matters is making it out with your soul still intact.”

“You did,” Hawke says.

“No, I didn’t. I had to rebuild it from nothing, because that’s all that was left. Even after...” Fenris’ face contorts into an ugly grimace. “Even after I was adopted.”

Hawke is afraid that if he speaks he’ll ruin whatever emotional momentum is propelling Fenris’ honesty, so he stays silent -- but Fenris is spent, shaking his head, brushing off his palms, closing back up.

“Look,” Fenris sighs, “I know that the only reason I survived was because of the kindnesses of strangers. Somebody checked on me, made sure I was eating enough, made sure I was safe. It’s the least I can do for these kids. _That’s_ why I come here; that’s why it’s important to me.”

“I understand,” Hawke says, even though he doesn’t, not really. He grew up in a whole family that loved each other, with his own bed and his own room, not a cot pushed against a wall next to a dozen others. “I’m glad I came with you.”

Fenris chuckles softly and nods, turning his phone over in his hands. He opens the photo he took of the two of them covered in flowers and Hawke cranes his neck to see it. They’re both squinting into the sun, Hawke already shedding pollen and petals on himself, and their smiles are matching: wide, vibrant, and ghosted with old sadness.

 

\---

 

Another thing that Hawke is learning about Orlesian summer is that it’s bipolar. The weather patterns change at breakneck speeds, typically without warning. Less than ten minutes ago, he’d felt the beginning of a sunburn on the back of his neck as they puttered along a bumpy road back into the city.

“Hmm,” Fenris mutters into Hawke’s ear, clinging to him as they went over uneven gravel, tipping back his head slightly to study the sky. “I think it’s going to rain.”

Hawke laughs at him. “Are you kidding? I can’t see a single cloud.”

Three minutes later, they’re hammered by blinding sheets of rain.

“There!” Fenris yelps over the sound of the raindrops. “Pull in there!”

Squawking in indignation, Hawke haphazardly parks the little blue scooter and they both dash inside a lonely-looking little coffee shop, the sign over its door worn by neglect. Hawke drips on the warped floorboards like a dog.

“Well,” he says, taking off his _Val Royaue_ sunglasses, “I don’t need these anymore, I guess.”

“You might,” Fenris says. “These storms never last. They’re intense, but they burn themselves out within ten minutes.” He wrings out his damp shirt. It’s sleeveless, and droplets tremble invitingly on the golden skin of his bare shoulders. Hawke tracks them with his eyes.

They haven’t talked at all about what they said to each other the other night before Fenris disappeared into a subway train. Hawke knows -- he _knows --_ that he’d only imagined the weight of that moment, but he clings to it anyway.

It’s not yet dusk, but the sun has disappeared behind heavy clouds, and the coffee shop is dark. Thunder shakes the windows, the panes of glass rattling fearfully, as the two of them sit at the high counter and sip thin, tasteless coffee from tiny mugs.

“Why are they so small?” Hawke asks, holding the little cup in his giant hand.

Fenris shrugs. “Orlais,” he says, as if that explains everything, which it kind of does.

Nodding, Hawke takes a bite of his pastry. It’s awful too, dry and chewy and reminiscent of cardboard.

“Will you tell me,” he asks through a mouthful of sugary sawdust, feeling very distinctly like he’s about to tread on thin ice, “about the people that adopted you?”

Fenris exhales a long breath. “Maybe. What do you want to know?”

“What are they like? Did they take good care of you?” Hawke spins his cup in its porcelain saucer because he fidgets when he’s nervous. Well, he fidgets all the time, actually. “Where are they now?”

“They’re back in Tevinter, I assume. I’m not sure.” Fenris’ voice is slow and easy, but he won’t look at Hawke.

“You don’t talk to them anymore?”

“No. There’s nothing to say. We fought constantly, and I think everyone was relieved when I left.” Fenris breaks off a piece of Hawke’s pastry, puts it in his mouth, then makes a face and pushes it away. “When you hear about orphaned kids, everyone talks about adoption like it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to you, but sometimes it only gets worse.”

“Worse,” Hawke echoes, a brick of lead forming in his stomach, “how?”

“Danarius and Hadriana didn’t take me in because they were dying to adopt a troubled, angry teenager with a drug problem out of the mere goodness of their hearts -- they took me in because they wanted a slave, a whipping boy. Then they expected me to stroke their egos and fawn at their feet, congratulate them for their selflessness.” Fenris is still speaking conversationally but his body is held tight, like he’s trying to keep some part of himself in check. “I lived in their house, but they were hardly my family. Legally, they owned me until I turned eighteen, and I bolted as soon as I could. It was self-preservation.”

“I’m --” Hawke almost says _I’m sorry,_ but he catches himself and says instead, “I wish things had been better for you.”

“They’re better now,” Fenris replies, “because I can choose the people in my life, and the places I want to be. I have the freedom to decide -- down to every little detail. I can choose whole milk or skim milk; I can choose to sleep in or wake up; I can stay here in Orlais, or I could leave tomorrow. That freedom? That’s all I ever wanted.”

Hawke squints as an unexpected burst of sunlight blinds him. It’s stopped raining and the clouds have peeled back to reveal one of the most brilliant sunsets he’s ever seen in his life. The light filtering in through the windows is lambent, glowing like gold, and dust motes glitter in the air.

“You weren’t kidding, I guess,” Hawke says. “It does blow over fast.”

“Orlesians always complain about these rainstorms,” Fenris muses, his elbows resting on the lip of the counter. His green eyes catch the light like polished stone. “It ruins their outdoor luncheons, or gets their expensive pantsuits wet, and it’s just so _inconvenient._ ” He mimics an Orlesian accent. “They assume if they vent their spleen enough, the weather will change just to please them.”

Hawke snorts quietly.

“You can’t ask a storm to change,” Fenris says. He splays his hand on the counter as he talks, and his fingers are calloused, rough. Scars stretch paper-thin over his knuckles, each one an untold story. “Maybe it’s messy and chaotic and unpredictable, maybe it’s inconvenient -- but that’s its nature, that’s all it’s ever known how to be.”

For once, Hawke’s brain helps him out: _He’s not just talking about the storm anymore,_ it mutters.

“I don’t mind rain,” Hawke says defiantly, leaning in a little.

Fenris looks at him over the chipped rim of his mug, his eyelashes dark. His controlled pose relaxes by a fraction of an inch and their knees touch beneath the counter.

Then, because his greatest skill -- indeed, perhaps his only skill -- is ruining everything, Hawke _winks_ at him in an attempt to be charming, and the vulnerable tenderness of the moment dissipates. It’s excruciating, the worst thing he’s ever done. He feels his soul leave his body, probably because it no longer wants anything to do with him.

But Fenris only laughs, low and full of pleasure, like he would expect nothing less from Hawke. Their knees stay pressed together until they leave the empty shop.

Hawke feels guilty about throwing away his half-finished pastry when the shop owner can clearly see him, even if it does taste like sawdust, so he wraps it up and tucks it in his pocket and thanks the man in Orlesian.

The road is muddy and slippery so Hawke goes slow on the scooter, and this time he only wheezes a little bit when Fenris folds his long arms around his torso; their bodies slot together easily, perfectly, as though by design.

They’re halfway back to the city when Hawke swerves to the side of the road.

“Look,” he says, pointing at a flat, still pond that’s surrounded by a lush barrier of reeds and home to a staggering number of ducks. The sound of their quacking is loud enough to be heard over the engine. “We have to stop. It’ll only take a minute, I swear, but I’ve got this shitty pastry left over and I have to get rid of it.”

“You want to feed the ducks,” Fenris says, toeing out the scooter’s kickstand as Hawke leaps off it and following him to the edge of the pond. “Of course.”

“I’ll only be a minute!” Hawke repeats over his shoulder as he jogs across the grass, pulling the bundle of wax paper from his pocket and tossing pieces of bread into the water. The ducks lose their minds and instantly flock to him, and he leads them up the bank with a trail of crumbs like a pied piper, all the way to Fenris who’s hanging back and taking photos.

“You’ve assembled an army,” Fenris tells him as Hawke, commander of the quacking horde, tosses the last of his pastry on the ground at Fenris’ feet. A trio of fat brown birds waddles in pursuit and Fenris adroitly sidesteps them, laughing. “You certainly have a way with animals.”

Hawke shrugs, rubbing the back of his neck where his sunburn itches just a little. “I mean, ducks aren’t terribly complex creatures,” he says. “We have that in common, I suppose.”

Once the last of the bread has been consumed, the birds slowly saunter away, back to paddling in lazy circles or digging their beaks in the mud. Hawke watches them for a moment, and Fenris stays next to him.

“I do like animals,” Hawke says slowly, staring at the delicate ripples in the water. The trees around them hum with cicadas. “They’re loyal and loving, and they deserve better than they get from most humans.”

“Hmm,” Fenris says. It’s a sound of agreement.

“I thought about being a vet when I was a kid,” Hawke tells him, grinning self-consciously.

“Do you still think about it?”

“Yeah,” Hawke says. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. But I don’t know if -- I mean, I’m not sure if I could, or if I’d even be any good at it. I’d have to quit my job, go back to school and start all over, if it was really something I wanted to...” He trails off in a tepid sigh, feeling slightly foolish.

Fenris elbows him gently. “Don’t give up before you’ve even started,” he says.

 

\---

 

It’s well past dark when Hawke drives them back into the city. Fenris is tired; he rests his head on the back of Hawke’s shoulder like a sleepy child.

“I’ll drop you off,” Hawke says, and Fenris nods, his hair tickling under Hawke’s jaw.

“Thanks,” he murmurs.

“It’s no problem,” Hawke tells him. “Your place is on the way.”

“No, that’s not...” Fenris says, hesitating. He tightens his arms a little bit around Hawke’s waist, and says it again, slower, with more meaning. “Thank you, Hawke.”

When Fenris gets off the bike and disappears into his apartment building, Hawke lingers on the curb for a moment, letting the bike idle, feeling the phantom weight of Fenris against his back. Tinny radio music echoes in the street from the corner market, and the air still smells like rain.

A moment later, he hears the clatter of a window being thrown open above him. When he looks up, the top half of Fenris’ body is jutting from the third floor, his crossed arms leaning on his windowsill.

“You’d be great,” he calls down to Hawke. “At being a veterinarian, I mean.”

Then he retreats back inside without waiting for a response.

 

\---

 

Day 19, and Hawke drags Fenris down to the river and they rent a tiny paddleboat shaped like a fish. Hawke doesn’t fall into the water even though Fenris threatens to push him in when he won’t stop singing songs from _Lady and the Tramp._

Fenris buys a giant bag of artisanal dog treats and Hawke liberally dispenses them to each dog he sees as they walk the streets of Val Royeaux. He learns how to say “please allow me to pet your beautiful dog” in perfect Orlesian, and he uses it often.

Hawke makes reservations for them at an expensive chic restaurant that serves cocktails with pretentious ingredients like caramelized Nevarran fig skins and sprigs of mint crushed by the feet of baby deer. They get raucously drunk and embarrass themselves before their dinner even arrives, so they end up buying some sort of deep-fried mess from a street cart which they eat with their hands while sitting on the sidewalk.

On day 21, they go to the run-down theater that shows porno films on Friday afternoons, although it’s not a Friday afternoon when they go. The movie they see is an old one, a black-and-white love story in Orlesian; Fenris translates everything for Hawke, but Hawke gets the feeling he wasn’t being entirely truthful with his translations because somehow, halfway through the film, the love story turned into an elaborate plot for vengeance and dragons were involved.

Day 22 is spent perched side-by-side on the white marble wall that encircles the Belle Marché, people-watching and drinking rum from a silver flask.

They visit museums and art galleries, they waste their nights in shitty bars listening to bad music, they loll in the neatly-manicured park down the street from Hawke’s hotel and talk heatedly about nothing. They arm-wrestle but Hawke cheats every time and it devolves into a shouting match. Fenris teaches him how to play a variety of card games that he’s never heard of, and Hawke loses a shocking amount of money.

They spend long stretches of silence together, easy and wordless.

Hawke memorizes Fenris: every freckle and scar, every white hair, every flicker of emotion. He hoards each second of their time together like a starving man, knowing each one is a second closer to the end of it.

When Isabela texts him on day 24, asking, _ready to come home soon?_ he curls up on the floor of his hotel room, presses his face into the crook of his elbow, and cries.


End file.
